The Macauley Circuit

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I don’t deny I destroyed Macauley’s diagram; I never did deny it, gentlemen. Of course I destroyed it, and for fine, substantial reasons. My big mistake was in not thinking the thing through at the beginning. When Macauley first brought me the circuit, I didn’t pay much attention to it—certainly not as much as it deserved. That was a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. I was too busy cod­dling old Kolfmann to stop and think what the Macauley circuit really meant.

If Kolfmann hadn’t shown up just when he did, I would have been able to make a careful study of the circuit and, once I had seen all the implications, I would have put the diagram in the incinerator and Macauley right after it. This is nothing against Macauley, you understand; he’s a nice, clever boy, one of the finest minds in our whole research department. That’s his trouble.

He came in one morning while I was outlining my graph for the Beethoven Seventh that we were going to do the following week. I was adding some ultrasonics that would have delighted old Ludwig—not that he would have heard them, of course, but he would have felt them—and I was very pleased about my interpretation. Unlike some synthesizer-interpreters, I don’t believe in changing the score. I figure Beethoven knew what he was doing, and it’s not my business to patch up his symphony. All I was doing was strengthening it by adding the ultrasonics. They wouldn’t change the actual notes any, but there’d be that feeling in the air which is the great artistic triumph of synthesizing.

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